Weekly Wrap Up – Daylight Savings Time edition

A reminder to everyone in the USA – this is the weekend to set your clocks back an hour.  Nothing says winter quite like driving home in the darkness at 5pm.  Here in Washington state, the rains are starting in earnest, another sign that winter is right around the corner, and Mt. Rainier to the east and the Olympics to the west all have fresh snow.  Over 3’ of fresh snow at Paradise on Rainier already!

With fewer hours of daylight to play outdoors, you’ll need some extra reading material and the wrap-up should help with that.  First up, the Massage Therapy Foundation has a blog!  Go read the first post by Ruth Werner on research literacy, a topic we should all be better versed in.

Over at Writing a Blue Streak, Allissa has been on a customer service binge.  This week, she talks about treating your customers as individuals.

Look around, people are begging to be treated as individuals. We are tired of marketing emails devoid of personality and automated phone systems.

Weekly Seth – Have you ever had a conversation with a potential client and they just won’t believe that massage can help with their pain/problem?  Read this post by Seth Godin to understand why and get an idea of what you can do about it.

The reason that people don’t believe you isn’t that you’re a liar. The reason we don’t believe you is that the guy before you (and the woman before him) were unduly optimistic hypesters and we got burned.

If you’re on Facebook, or you watch Ellen Degeneres, you’ll know that she ad David Beckham played a prank on a massage therapist.  Kat at LMT or Bust shows us what we can learn from this video.  She talks about boundaries and being prepared for the unexpected.  A very thoughtful read.

Many of us are running our own businesses.  It can be very scary, tiring, and overwhelming.  Our first instinct is always to hunker down, put our shoulder to the wheel and WORK our little tails off.  I do this.  A lot.  I forget fun, or I feel guilty having fun.  Then I read this post about having fun from Johnny B. Truant and it gave me chills.  I’ve printed it out and I will read it on a regular basis until it becomes habit.  (disclaimer: if you don’t like naughty language, don’t read JBT, but you’ll be missing some amazing stuff).

Influential Marketing has an interesting post about the death of the private practice in medicine and some theories as to why it happened and what can be done about it.  We, as massage therapists, share a lot of business traits with doctors, so I recommend this post.

So that should give you enough ‘sitting by the fire’ reading for the weekend.  Of course, I’ve already read these, so if you have some other great blog posts you’ve read and think I would enjoy – let me know!

photo credit:  zoutedrop